QinetiQ has been awarded a £15 million contract by the UK Ministry of Defence to manage, maintain and update the classified military data management system, Thundercloud. Thundercloud collates, analyses and distributes meteorological and oceanographic data at all security classifications for use by military forces through a secure network of systems, to land, sea and air operations anywhere in the world. The data, services and products delivered by Thundercloud gives a heightened understanding of the environment, providing shared situational awareness across different military teams. This is a crucial advantage for naval, air force, and land-based teams who need secure, accurate, detailed geospatial information to fully exploit the environment or mitigate its impact on operations.
James Willis, Chief Executive, UK Intelligence, QinetiQ, said: “QinetiQ is proud to apply its expertise in cyber, data and electromagnetics to ensure this critical capability continues to provide its vital service to our military forces around the world.”
Commander Nick Davies, Joint Operational Meteorology and Oceanography Centre (JOMOC) said: “We are very pleased to award this ongoing contract to the QinetiQ team who have ably supported us for 24 years already, working collaboratively with us on what’s needed to deliver this key capability now and for the future. QinetiQ has worked as a partner to us to get the best from the system in the past, frequently going above and beyond to give us a reliable, best of breed solution and I’m looking forward to continuing that over the next two years.”
Thundercloud was developed in the 1980s by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) and transitioned to QinetiQ management in 2001 where it has been run and maintained through several upgrade cycles. QinetiQ has retained the support contract to manage the capability through competitions in 2014 and 2019, with this latest round of competition seeing QinetiQ’s expertise called on for a further two years with a focus on Agile change delivery. Demonstrating QinetiQ’s commitment to partnering with small and medium enterprises, Hampshire based technical managed services company, Thorn LTD, will provide a key role in engineering support, as well as other SMEs providing specialist technical support.
QinetiQ is a multinational defence technology company headquartered in Farnborough, Hampshire. It operates primarily in the defence, security and critical national infrastructure markets and run testing and evaluation capabilities for air, land, sea and target systems. “QinetiQ” is an invented name. “Qi” is supposed to reflect the company’s energy, “net” its networking ability, and “iq” its intellectual resources. As a private entity, QinetiQ was created in April 2001; prior to this its assets had been part of Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), a now-defunct British government organisation. While a large portion of DERA’s assets, sites, and employees were transferred to QinetiQ, other elements were incorporated into Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), which remains in government ownership.
